#93 Woodrow Wilson & Presidential Morality w/ Patricia O'Toole
The Road to Now
Benjamin Sawyer
4.8 • 628 Ratings
🗓️ 30 April 2018
⏱️ 59 minutes
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Summary
On The Road to Now, we talk a lot about how understanding history is essential to making informed political decisions. In today's episode, Patricia O'Toole joins us to talk about what happened when a historian got control of the White House.
O'Toole's new biography The Moralist: Woodrow Wilson and the World He Made (Simon & Schuster, 2018) examines the life of a President whose policy was guided by his personal sense of morality. From today's perspective, Woodrow Wilson's time in the White House (1913-1921) seems full of contradictions. He supported a constitutional amendment to ensure women's suffrage, but oversaw the re-segregation of America's civil service. He championed national self-determination for the people of Europe, but readily deployed US soldiers to intervene in Latin America. And he won re-election with the slogan "He Kept Us Out Of War," yet called for America's entry into World War I just a little over a month after his second inauguration. In spite of this, O'Toole says that a close examination of Wilson's thought and policy reveals a consistent world view that binds these seemingly contradictory actions together.
Patricia O'Toole is the author of five books, including The Five of Hearts: An Intimate Portrait of Henry Adams (Simon & Schuster, 2006), which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. She previously taught in the School of the Arts at Columbia University was a fellow of the Society of American Historians. Her new biography of Woodrow Wilson The Moralist was released on April 24, 2018.
The Road to Now is a member of the Osiris Podcast Network. For more on this episode and others, visit our website www.TheRoadToNow.com
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This podcast is in the Loop, the Legion of Osiris Podcasts. |
| 0:07.0 | What does that mean? |
| 0:09.0 | Osiris is a community of great music and culture podcasts. |
| 0:12.0 | If you like this one, go check out others at Osirispod.com and get in the loop. |
| 0:18.0 | Osiris is partnered with Relix Magazine at relics.com. |
| 0:22.4 | May his music month on The Road to Now podcast, and to kick things off, |
| 0:25.9 | we visit Dean McLeod at the Woody Guthrie Center in Tulsa, Oklahoma. |
| 0:29.1 | Woody's music and his artwork and the things that he wrote, |
| 0:32.6 | those were just his avenues of being a social justice advocate. |
| 0:36.5 | We definitely, as part of our mission, want to make sure people understand who he was |
| 0:40.8 | as a person and what his ultimate goal was to speak up for the disenfranchise, to help people |
| 0:46.6 | who needed it, and to reach out to everyone to join together and work together for a better |
| 0:52.4 | tomorrow. |
| 0:52.8 | This episode kills fascist, |
| 0:54.5 | The Life and Legacy of Woody Guthrie with Dean McLeod, |
| 0:58.4 | premiering May 7th on the road to now. |
| 1:00.3 | There was a big high wall there that tried to stop me. |
| 1:05.2 | Sign was... I'm Bob Crawford and joined, as always, by Dr. Ben Sawyer. |
| 1:21.5 | Ben, we had a great interview this week, a fascinating interview with an author named Patricia O'Toole |
| 1:30.4 | about her book, The Moralist, Woodrow Wilson and the World He Made. |
| 1:36.0 | Yes, and what a world he made. This, you know, this is, this overlaps a lot with my own |
| 1:42.9 | research on the Soviet Union, kind of the formation of the Russian Revolution and all of this. |
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